Sunday, August 31, 2008

I've been cutting down on caffeine. A cup at work, then water for the rest of the day.

Maybe two cups. But a lot of water.

At home we've long since switched to decaf. But .. no problem! I've got a tin of instant. It ran out. I didn't get any at the store today because .. well .. I am trying to cut down.

This evening a massive withdrawal headache ambushed [1] me and wrapped my head in a dull cloud of pain.

Me: I'm .. uh .. going down to the gas station to get some coffee.Her: ?Me: Well, we're out of the leaded instant stuff and I've got a headache.Her: What you need is some Tylenol ...Me: (snarling) What I need is some coffee.

The first step is admitting you have a problem. Granted this isn't heroin or booze or snorting dandelions but .. still. I'd be happier not having a headache when I go without.

So .. decaf for me. If you see me with a cup of leaded from here on in, hit me on the head.

Thanks!

[1] In 'A Rumor of War', Philip Caputo related that at OCS one of their tactical instructors yelled at them 'Ambush is murder and murder is fun'.

I don't know about the murder part but I did participate in a training exercise where we executed a hasty near ambush on the Blue team. The look of surprise on their faces was very satisfying. I hasten to add it's not because we were so good but more that we were motivated and they were trudging along wishing they were somewhere else.

Assitant Police Chief Bostrom has talked about the St. Paul Standard, and on the anniversary of last years’ critical mass police riot, we saw its true face. The ramsey county sheriff’s dept and the SPPD raided the RNC convergence space and detained over 50 people in an attempt to preempt planned protests of the rnc on Monday.

If you want to be taken seriously you should

Remember Mrs. Robinson's advice: Spelling Counts.[1]

Employ encryption.

The former makes the adults in the room take you seriously. The latter keeps John Law in dark about what you're up to, so you don't get raided before you can do your thing.

"It's a word that people who don't like them use to describe them in kind of a bad, unfriendly way," Rita said.

"Like a pejorative term?" Nell said.

Rita laughed, more nervous than amused. "Exactly."

"Why do the Atlantans have such a big clave?"

"Well, each phyle has a different way, and some ways are better suited to making money than others, so some have a lot of territory and others don't."

"What do you mean, a different way?"

"To make money you have to work hard-to live your life in a certain way. The Atlantans all live that way, it's part of their culture. The Nipponese too. So the Nipponese and the Atlantans have as much money as all the other phyles put together."

"Why aren't you an Atlantan?"

"Because I don't want to live that way. All the people in Dovetail like to make beautiful things. To us, the things that the Atlantans do– dressing up in these kinds of clothes, spending years and years in school-are irrelevant. Those pursuits wouldn't help us make beautiful things, you see. I'd rather just wear my blue jeans and make paper."

"But the M.C. can make paper," Nell said.

"Not the kind that the Atlantans like."

"But you make money from your paper only because the Atlantans make money from working hard," Nell said.

Rita's face turned red and she said nothing for a little while. Then, in a tight voice, she said, "Nell, you should ask your book the meaning of the word discretion."

- The Diamond AgeNeal Stephenson

Readers who are interested the fine details of what Nell and Rita are talking about in 'The Diamond Age' are directed to the book's wiki page.

Briefly ...

The book takes place after the State has been rendered unworkable. Hooray, anarchy! Except that people still need - or at least desire - organization. Thus, people have chosen to divide themselves into Tribes or Phyles. If you're not in a tribe, you're a thete and the lowest of the low.

Vickys' are Neo-Victorians or Atlantans. Neo-Victorians are a tribe that has rejected the cultural excess of the late 20th early 21st century and turned to a polite and well-disciplined culture, based loosly on the Victorian era. When you have a well-disciplined culture that takes learning, morals and manners seriously, you get a lot done. Thus Atlantans and the Nipponese have a lot of the wealth in that world. Plus they dress really well.

Also, at least partly because of cultural repression, Neo Victorians make excellent warriors.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Problem: bulldozers tear up the ground scratching out roads to the logging site. Helicopters can lift the logs out so you don't irritate the local Greens - but rotary-winged aircraft are expensive to operate.

The Solution: A lighter than air craft that rotates the bag for control and lift. The intention was that the operator sit in a cab suspended by cables underneath the bag.

It's a solution for more than just logging. Helicopters aren't just expensive - they're loud. And they have a lousy failure mode. [1] CycloCrane was meant to pick up as much as 35 tons at a time. There should be a lot of business for a machine like that, as anyone stuck on a two-lane road behind half a double-wide can appreciate.

An innovative idea. Too much so. They ran out of funds, the 80s kicked in and fuel prices went down. Aerolift tried to interest the government. The government expressed cautious interest. Then the Cold War ended.

For technology to flourish, someone has to take a chance. In the end, the CycloCrane company did fail. That old blimp hangar is now an airship museum. The CycloCrane forms one of its many exhibits. It floats there as a permanent reminder of the almost quality of so much wonderfully inventive technology.

But should it also be a grim warning to us? Don't gamble on five-legged horses? I obviously don't think so. So I begin with the first issue that comes at me out of that Tillamook blimp hanger. It is, "Why do the reckless survive?" Reckless people expose themselves to more danger. Surely that threatens their Darwinian survival. You'd expect each generation to be more careful than the last. But recklessness does survive -- generation after generation.

The hunter who won't face a buffalo starves. The parent who won't risk her life to save her child faces Darwinian extinction. Writer Melvin Konner asks us to look more closely at risk-takers. He explains that psychologists identify four faces of that person:

[1] If stuff stops working generally what happens is you crash really fast into stuff. If that stuff is water it's worse - the first thing machine does is flip over. Then it sinks. This all happens very quickly.

In international comparisons of infant mortality, the U.S. usually ranks behind most other countries, many of whom have socialized medicine (see chart above, click to enlarge). But do countries around the world measure infant mortality consisently and uniformly? Apparently not, see explanation below from a doctor:

The main factors affecting early infant survival are birth weight and prematurity. The way that these factors are reported — and how such babies are treated statistically — tells a different story than what the numbers reveal.

Low birth weight infants are not counted against the “live birth” statistics for many countries reporting low infant mortality rates.

According to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 kg is not considered a living child.

But in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live births. The mortality rate of such babies — considered “unsalvageable” outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive — is extraordinarily high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews U.S. infant mortality statistics.

The chart above (at the link) shows the real, inflation-adjusted prices of eggs (in 2008 dollars), annually back to 1890. The price we're paying today for eggs (in real dollars) is about 1/7 of the price 100 years ago, a decline of 85% compared to the price our grandparents, great-grandparents or great-great grandparents paid in the early 1900s.

Everything you know about the Soviet - Georgia War of 2008 (might) be wrong.

Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia.

Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Coleridge, ''The Raven''

Underneath an old oak treeThere was of swine a huge companyThat grunted as they crunched the mastFor that was ripe, and fell full fast.Then they trotted away, for the wind grew high:One acorn they left, and no more might you spy.

Next came a Raven, that liked not such follyHe belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy!Blacker was he than blackest jet,Flew low in the rain, and his feathers not wetHe picked up the acorn and buried it straightBy the side of a river both deep and great.

Where then did the Raven go?He went high and lowOver hill, over dale, did the black Raven go.Many Autumns, many SpringsTraveled he with wandering wings:Many summers, many WintersI can't tell half his adventures.

At length he came back, and with him a SheAnd the acorn was grown to a tall oak tree.They built them a nest in the topmost bough,And young ones they had, and were happy enow.

But soon came a Woodman in leathern guise,His brow, like a pent-house, hung over his eyes.He'd an axe in his hand, not a word he spoke,But with many a hem! and a sturdy stroke,At length he brought down the poor Raven's own oak.His young ones were killed; for they could not depart,And their mother did die of a broken heart.

The boughs from the trunk the Woodman did sever; And they floated it down on the course of the river.They sawed it in planks, and its bark they did strip,And with this tree and others they made a good ship.

The ship, it was launched; but in sight of the landSuch a storm there did rise as no ship would withstand.It bulged on a rock, and the waves rush'd in fast;Round and round flew the Raven, and cawed to the blast.He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls--See! see! o'er the topmast the mad water rolls!

Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet,And Death riding home on a cloud he did meet,And he thank'd him again and again for this treat:They had taken his all; and REVENGE IT WAS SWEET!

52 kb of data - copied like that (snap): admirably fast. Some minor problems to work out.

Authentication bits in plain text make me itch. I need to encrypt those values. This should not be a problem in 2008. This is not a show stopper on my local disk [2] but it needs to happen for a server.

Error detection.

The sample above fails if the remote directory exists.

[1] For not good reason except that it's fun .. and I think that Ruby should make an adequate system administration tool. Stuff like this is important if you're going to use it that way.[2] It should be a problem. Unencrypted anything in 2008 is ungood.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Acme SAC. A programmer's editor, shell and user interface expressly designed to make you feel less intelligent than you thought you were.

I skimmed Acme: A User Interface for Programers. Unix terminal windows are really teletypes and are an archaic way of talking to a computer - no argument there. Gotta be a better way - preach it! Basic concepts, explanations, check.

I fire it up at work. Hmm - it needs a proxy to communicate outside the corporate firewall - half the demos and 'isn't this nifty' stuff in the readme are elsewhere! And where do I set a proxy up at? Okay, wait till I get home, then. It comes with a shell - awesome. Or not so much - the shell seems to live in it's own weird little world and I can't get to my files to see them. No wonder when I open a new window with a valid path it tells me I'm full of poo. And so on.

And the point of an editor, shell and so on that won't let me at the files I already have are what?

I can't tell if what I'm looking at is a learning curve that looks like a sheer wall ninety miles high or some kind of practical joke played on an unsuspecting world by minanthropic computer nerds from AT&T.

A long, long time ago I joined the Marines. I was introduced to what was then the brand new M16A2. Guys in the fleet were running around with clapped out 'A1s and we got weapons right .. out .. of .. the box.

The training material was geared to teaching guys who had been shooting the 'A1 about the new and improved A2. Half the introductory material was going on about the differences. They were selling the weapon.

If it's Mattel, it's swell.

I didn't need to be sold. I didn't care that a weapon I'd only seen on TV had feature X and was replaced by feature Y and why it was so much better. Just teach me how to shoot the weapon I've got, and stop wasting my time with bullshit.

A better rifle. And a better looking rifle.

As the M16A2 training material, so Acme SAC.

What I need are not reams of theory and endless mailing lists of smug hyper-smart computer guys running vast arrays of Plan 9 and Inferno networks giving me a long back story on why this is the greatest thing since sliced cheese. I don't want to learn how to tear the motor apart - maybe later, but not now.

Now, I want to get in and drive. How to find the friggin' files I was working on pre Acme SAC. How do I get it to talk through a proxy. Can I use it to SSH to another system - 'cause I think that would be pretty nity. Can it be a better editor than TextMate?

Just a tutorial that is designed with your average ordinary guy, is all I'm looking for.

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, ispublishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008,Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 untilOctober 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after theentries were written.

No way it’s Piskies - they actually got something done. There wouldn’thave been bombings, just Exploratory Commissions on Suicide BombPlanning, with sub-committees on Vests, Explosives, Nails and OtherFasteners (’screw’ is heteronormative), Enhancing the Experience (ratpoison, etc.), Integration of Suicide Bombing into the MillenniumDevelopment Goals. Then there’s the indaba groups, where allpresent will talk about how the Commission affects them, how they feelabout the difference between various different targets and methods, andall will engage in active listening, as we learn to ‘live into theSuicide Bombing’ together with the creative tensions of how we seeSuicide Bombing differently, but are part of the same Murderous Drive.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

You have to say 'yes' or 'no'. 'Yea' 'naw' 'yup' 'nope' 'nuh-uh' ... don't convey what you mean with clarity. They're not precise[1].

(eye roll) Yes, please.

Thank you!

Later That Night

Did you wash everything when you took your bath?

No.

Hey - you know you're supposed to wash everything[2].

Well. I didn't wash my skin on the inside or my blood or my bones.

Wha?

Daddy. You have to be precise.

Then he smiled - a nice smile - and brushed his teeth.

[1] Some of you will accuse me of being a nit picky wretch. And you would be right. All I can say is that you were not present for a truly monumental tongue lashing on this subject from the company gunnery sergeant when you were eighteen and reporting to Infantry Training School. Stuff like that has a lasting impact.

[2] He has this thing going on where he misses great chunks of his body when washing. So that he'll have clean everything else and muddy elbows. Or a grubby neck. He's eight - but I'd prefer a clean child after a bath not one with a grimy neck.

I have a very vivid memory. We're at my Grandparents house in Fort Rock. My Aunt, sitting at the kitchen table shouled "I won!". She'd spent a few hours with a deck of cards at solitaire and ... she'd won. A minor victory but good for a few cheery moments.

Well ... I won!

That's Civilization II, running on the medium-hard level. I don't usually play it to completion but there we are.

Got the mother-lovin' spaceship to Alpha Centauri while having my shins kicked by some aggressive and advanced Mongels allied with low tech but annoying Vikings.

And yes, Fort Rock is about as deserty and sage-brushy as it looks in those pictures. Helluva place to grow alfalfa if you ask me.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Guess who wandered by and decided they'd make a most excellent hidden treasure?

Miscreant and all around Boy.

Not one or two vials. All of them.

He and his friend did a truly righteous job hiding them. Some by the pond, some along the fence, some in his friend's sandbox. Dozens and dozens of years from now people are going to dig these up and wonder "what they hey?"

I am at the International Space University (www.isunet.edu) this summer, and we have to do a group project... Mine is an assessment of the Google Lunar X Prize, and some of its potential outcomes. To that end, could you please use your network(s) and ask people to come to this link, and respond to our survey.

It should take less than 5-10 minutes, It's not very deep or time consuming. But we think it will be pretty useful to the Foundation, and to many of the competitors.

Of course you will have access to the report and the survey results when we are finished. The 'meat' of the report will be about 100 "actionable recommendations" to a variety of stakeholders (Foundation, competitors, space agencies, private space sector, etc.)

If you do send it out, please email me back and tell me which lists you posted it to, and a bullet point description of who the target of that list is.

Feel free to pass this along to whomever you think should see it.

Thanks, my team and I appreciate it.

Take care. MJLMichael J Laine

Not many people read this blog. No, it's true! But some do, and if they tell six people and if those six tell six more .. copy, paste, pass it along.

And I know that some actual smart people [1] from SpaceX wander by, and XCOR shows up in my referrer log now and again. So who knows?

[1] Yes, their rockets blow up and this might be proof of that funny old saying about how to make a fortune in space launch [2] - but they are still in business. And XCOR has attracted investment [3] - way to go! They're doing something right out there.

This is not (I think) some kind of fad like on-line pet foot stores but the beginnings of the real-deal commercial space-age.

[2] How do you make a small fortune in the launch industry? Start out with a large fortune.

You don't need two eyes for depth perception. No, I knew that - what I did not know was that there were terrestrial examples of that. Behold, the mantis shrimp

Each compound eye is made up of up to 10,000 separate ommatidia of the apposition type. Each eye consists of two flattened hemispheres separated by six parallel rows of highly specialised ommatidia, collectively called the midband, which divides the eye into three regions. This is a design which makes it possible for mantis shrimp to see objects with three different parts of the same eye. In other words, each individual eye possesses trinocular vision and depth perception.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Cut a red onion into rings. Wrap in a twist of foil. Pour vodka into the twist. Keep pouring until it's full. Wonder why you even have a bottle of vodka - who in the house drinks this stuff? Wrap a second layer of foil around the twist because there is a leak in the twist and vodka is leaking onto the counter. Briefly ponder the wisdom of cooking with something that smells like edible lighter fluid.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Posting a (slightly edited) comment from Soni's blog. Because I do want to post something here every day and I don't feel like fooling around. I've got stuff to do.

This ... was my day. My entire day.

My latest true love at work is a whacked bit of enterprise software. The application keeps data in MS SQL Server 2005. I need to extract data from it’s db that the application won’t let me get at in the way I want. It can produce HTML or PDF reports at the click of a button but I can’t script that function and parsing the data in HTML is a PITA anyway.

I want it generated by script in ASCII, bitches. Then I’ll slam it into our documentation wiki. Eighteen times a day if I want to. Because I can.

So I install the sql command line tool. Except that 2005 (unlike 2000) installs in a locked down mode. So I need to run the tool to expose the db to the command line tool ..

Did I come here to drain a swamp .. don’t recall .. wow look at that alligator!

Productivity Monster

The configuration tool is .. not .. installed in the Start menu. It does not appear to be on the server at all. This appears to be a once-in-a-lifetime kinda deal so extraordinary that MS’s technet is silent on the subject.

Well … TechNet says in a distant way .. just run the tool. It’s not there? Oh, g’wan - you’re not looking hard enough.

Meanwhile the work that I had to set aside to tend to this is piling up. And it’s the ‘fun’ work wherein I play with Unix boxes and *nix applications that certainly have their failings but the operating system getting … in … my .. way is not one of them.

Monday, August 11, 2008

If the recipients act in a way he disapproves of — namely, donating to certain conservative or Republican causes — Matzzie and his new nonprofit group, called Accountable America, will unleash what the New York Times describes as “a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives.”

Not just a gross violation of manners and civil discourse - it's also against the law. See 42 U.S.C.§ 1985(3) ..

if ‘two or more persons conspire to prevent by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, from giving his support or advocacy in a legal manner, toward or in favor of the election of any lawfully qualified person as an elector for President or Vice President, or as a Member of Congress of the United States; or to injure any citizen in person or property on account of such support or advocacy.’

Threatening people in the name of saving the Republic. Nice piece of work there, Sluggo.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

I've seen worse. No, I'm not a regular patron but when you're 20 and overseas in the service .. you go see the show, at least once. I went back, now and again.

In this case myself and few other Marines found ourselves in the midst of the sad, run-down collection of strip clubs and bars outside Camp Foster. Just a pale echo of the glories in Kin-ville, a few miles up the road. The only redeeming quality these places had was they were within walking distance of Camp Foster.

When the best thing you can say about a place is that it beckons to Marines so down-and-out they can't scrape up cab fare ..

On a weeknight. The week before payday. Two so-so Filipinas - and you have to hunt long and hard to find a so-so Filipina - were sort of .. not gyrating, just kind of waving their arms around. Like dorky kids in junior high school they were kind of .. dancing but not dancing. Moving, to be charitable and to abuse the positive notions of that word.

About as sexy and inviting as watching grandma shuffle around the kitchen heating up last night's meatloaf.

I was staring at this problem - I want to have control over bits on a webpage, by user and lo! Someone has already done most of the hard work for me: RESTful_ACL.

RESTful_ACL is a simple Access Control Layer for Ruby on Rails. It restricts access on a fine-grained level to any RESTful MVC stack. While the ACL structure and engine are provided by this plugin, the implementation is fully up to the user. Every application is different and everyone likes to setup their User / Account / Role resources differently; this plugin will allow you to do your thing and keep that thing locked down.

Please see the wiki (http://github.com/mdarby/restful_acl/wikis/) for more information.

Awesome. And the creator, Matt Darby, manfully resisted the urge to call it 'ACTS as ACL', which is a good thing.

Monday, August 04, 2008

The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much profounder and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand.

Hell, I'm not even sure some of the companies in the report are even American. BP - in't that British Petroleum? Royal Dutch Shell - hell, I didn't even know the Dutch still had a monarchy, let alone a big friggin' oil company. You learn something new everyday.

So ... yeah. I dunno where it's all going to come from - maybe ExxonMobil can take out a payday loan or something from the Cash Store.

Hawthorne CA – August 2, 2008 - Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) has scheduled the launch of the Falcon 1 Flight 3 mission for Saturday, August 2nd. The launch window will open at 4:00 p.m. (PDT) / 7:00 p.m. (EDT) and remain open for five hours. If launch is delayed for any reason, SpaceX has range availability to resume countdown through August 5.

Lift-off of the vehicle will occur from SpaceX's Falcon 1 launch site at the Kwajalein Atoll, about 2500 miles southwest of Hawaii. Falcon 1 launch facilities are situated on Omelek Island, part of the Reagan Test Site (RTS) at United States Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific.

SpaceX will provide live coverage of the Falcon 1 Flight 3 mission via webcast at: www.SpaceX.com. The webcast will begin 30 minutes prior to launch and will include mission briefings, live feeds and launch coverage from the launch site at the Kawjalein Atoll, as well as a special video tour of SpaceX facilities by Elon Musk, CEO and CTO.

Update: Failed to reach orbit - the stages didn't separate. Not great but like the man said, rocket science is easy, it's the engineering that's tough.

Friday, August 01, 2008

In the course of the chat, Burke came up with approximately the following statement, which has stayed with me since:

"Systems dump excess energy in the form of structure."

It may not sound like not much, but it's rather profound. It essentially says that a system operating in surplus won't stay so, but instead will act to build up its own structure at the expense of the surplus. Looked at the right way, it's a nutshell explanation for the existence of life - an eruption of structure in response to excess solar energy.

I doubt the meat of the statement was original with Burke, but given his gift for a turn of phrase, the formulation may have been. At any rate, I've never seen it elsewhere. It keeps coming up in my own thinking and writing, so I've decided to memorialize it as "Burke's Law of Metadynamics" for reference by myself and anyone else who cares. The 'Burke' is obvious, the 'metadynamic' sets it aside from rules that operate within dynamic systems of fixed structure; it is a statement instead about the malleability of structure.

It's been long since I've done ecosystems work, so that's not the reason it keeps coming up. Experience has show me that the statement applies equally to human organizations and systems, particularly if you substitute 'wealth' by analogy to 'energy'. In that form it's a more succinct statement of several of John Gall's Laws of Systemantics.